Did Square stop working with anyone else's NFC reader on their phone over the weekend?

[Solstice58]

Did Square stop working with anyone else's NFC reader on their phone over the weekend?  I had to start entering credit card data manually to complete several sales.

[Arie]

Hello @Solstice58 👋
 

Thanks for reaching out to us here in the seller community. I'm sorry you've had trouble accepting payments over the weekend. While we didn't experience any outages affecting the Square Reader last weekend, we recommend following these troubleshooting steps when you're having trouble accepting payments. Please also let us know if you've been seeing any particular error messages on your app! I'll keep an eye out for your reply 🙂

[Solstice58]

Hi Arie - Thanks for taking a look at this.  So the error message I was getting on my phone when I tried to check someone out via the app and NFC function was "Invalid Device", which made no sense to me?  I had used the device all day the previous day to record sales and even earlier in the same day.  The app just decided not to talk to the phone or the phone decided not to talk to the app.  I did all the suggested things to reconnect the two - Doing a hard restart of my phone, deleting and reinstalling the app, clearing both the cache and data of the app, checking the NFC connection turned on, etc.  Nothing had changed from when the NFC was working just fine.  That's what made me think that there might have been a software update, since my phone downloads and installs them automatically.

Losing the NFC capability made me look like a "rookie" at the art festival who didn't know what he was doing, and it was embarrassing.  My feeling is that Square will blame my phone, and the phone people will blame the app - and the actual problem will never be solved.  To say I'm unhappy would be an understatement. 

[Arie]

I understand your frustration, @Solstice58. Have you downloaded any new apps in between these days? And which phone are you using (make and model), so we can pass this feedback on to the team? 

[Solstice58]

Thanks for checking in Arie! 

No, no new apps (was way too busy for that).  My phone is a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, with Android Version 13.

I hope we can figure this out.  Thanks for the help!

[JJ_]

Hey there @Solstice58 jumping in for @Arie while she is out of the office. One thing I would recommend since you mentioned this was working fine the day before, would be to reinstall the Square Application if you haven't done so yet. If you have already completed this task and your issue persists, the next step would be to reach out to our support team.  

Our Support team would be able to look into this with you! When you have a moment, please reach out directly by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[Solstice58]

Thanks JJ!  thanks for jumping in!

Yeah, tried that...  Multiple times.  Didn't work at the time.

The Square App now seems to be communicating with the NFC function of my phone.  An intermittent problem is more troubling that a complete shutdown in some ways since I didn't do anything to my phone or to the app.  It doesn't give me confidence in relying on the app in the future.

[JJ_]

I truly understand your concerns @Solstice58. If the issue does become intermittent as you mentioned it would be a good idea to to surface it to our support team so they can file a ticket to our engineers to better understand what is going on. 

When you have a moment, please reach out directly by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[MIKE196]

Hello ...same thing here since Monday..the tap to pay was remarkably reliable since we started with square about 2 months ago..Now I already did all the trouble shooting mentionned above and still tap to pay will work on and off for no reason

How embarrassing when customer is in front of you usually in a hury and wants just to move on with their day..it's sounds like nobody has a handle on this at square..soo I will unfortunattely go back to our previous provider.

Just a noté phone model Samsung S23

[Katie_SQ]

Sorry to hear that you’re having trouble accepting payments with Tap to Pay on Android, @MIKE196!

Our team would love to take a closer look into this with you to try and find out why this might be happening. Would you mind clarifying what specifically is happening on your phone when you try to accept payments using Tap to Pay?

- Are you also receiving the “Invalid Device” in-app error message when trying to process these transactions?
- Is the customer’s card/phone being recognized at all when you hold it to the back of your phone?

We’ll keep an eye out for your reply. 🙂

[PapaHeiryu]

I'm currently having the same issue as well, but on my Galaxy S23+. I've tried every single troubleshooting method mentioned above, as well as some on Google. I'm currently chatting with Support, but he's unfortunately unable to help and is forwarding it to engineering. I'm getting "Failed to Validate Device" as well as "Device Not Compatible". This is leaving me without a payment service for the 1-2 days it's going to take to hear back from engineering. I can manually type the numbers in, but it charges extra for that.

[Solstice58]

..

[forgetful1nu]

I am having the same issue.  Unable to tap or swip. Same samsung s23 ultra.  I can do the phone to phone tap. Just not able to take card. I carry 2 phones and have to use my iPhone to take cade payment now. Please help.

[Solstice58]

UPDATE:  Because of the issues I had last festival season with Tap to Pay , I bought an external Square reader to use with my S23 Ultra phone, hoping that would solve the issue.  It doesn't!  The Square reader randomly loses connectivity with my phone, while there's no issue with connecting to any other Bluetooth device.  I either have to close and restart the App or completely restart my phone to reconnect the external Square Reader.  Yes, entering card data manually while the customer is standing there waiting works - but makes me look like an amateur (or an idiot) while trying to run a transaction, which I absolutely hate!

I believe Square is designed for iPhone use, and Samsung/Android phones are secondary to them.  I also believe, because this thread has so many entries and has gone on for so long, that Square doesn't care and isn't trying to address it.  If there's another method to take payments and look like a professional at art festival type of events, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.  I would not recommend Square for use by any Samsung/Android phone user. 

Anyone got any other options?